Open Wardrobes

Well, I've taken a bit of a hiatus over the past month ever since the 24-hour play festival. But since then I've polished up Circus of Fate, plus finished up another new 10-minute piece (written for a project on the Playwrights Binge list) which gave me a total of 3 new 10-minute plays (including the revised NUTS!) to start sending out. Over the past month or so I've been submitting to a number of contests and theaters, including Lakeshore's 10-minute festival which I hope to finally make it in this year. And coming up this weekend is the start of NaNoWriMo (National Write a Novel in a Month month), so I expect to be less idle than I have been!


This weekend Kelly and I also attended the Start the Music! program at the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, along with my sister and her two little girls. I've been wanting for years to take our nieces to this and so I was excited to finally be able to do so. Start the Music! is aimed at the 3-6 age range (my nieces are 5 1/2 and 3 1/2, perfect). It starts with a variety of hands-on activities focused around a family of instruments (this weekend was the brass family) and a story (The Tortoise and the Hare). The girls made little tortoise and hare puppets, tried out a trumpet, and decorated their own horn. Following that was a 30-minute concert featuring a brass quintet (the SPCO's trumpet players Gary and Lynn, and horn player Paul, plus additional musicians on tuba and trombone) that was centered around the story of "The Tortoise and the Hare" with musical accompaniment. The musicians also played a variety of short pieces while they explained their instruments and how they worked. It was a delightful program and the girls had a great time (all the kids seemed to enjoy blowing their horns).


All of the SPCO's family-oriented programs are now free thanks to Target, but you have to sign up for a random drawing to receive tickets since the demand is so high (the next one is in January). However, a little known secret is that people who receive tickets sometimes call back to say they can't use them, and those tickets are then given away on a first-come, first-served basis. So if you're interested in this sort of program, keep an eye on the SPCO's website to register for the drawing and don't be shy about calling even if you don't receive tickets, you never know!

Yes, it's already week 3 (and this week I am more ahead of the game in writing about it). Last night Kelly and I caught the ICOF concert at Temple Israel featuring the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment (OAE) and the SPCO. As with last weekend's concert, this concert also featured each orchestra as half the concert. The OAE, an orchestra which only performs on period instruments (i.e. gut string on the violins, no valves on the trumpets, etc), kicked things off with several Baroque pieces: a divertimento by Mozart, a sinfonia by C.P.E Bach, and a Haydn violin concerto. All three pieces were led by the OAE's Rachel Podger who directed from the violin. (Like the SPCO the OAE does not have a single music director.) First, I have to say that these musicians were great fun to watch (it's always a pleasure to watch performers who are clearly enjoying themselves), especially Ms. Podger. The Mozart, for example, was a lively little piece (you can always count on Mozart to be good fun) and the C.P.E. Bach piece was filled with musical twists and turns. All in all the OAE put on a very nice performance and I enjoyed all 3 pieces, but while it felt solid it did not feel like anything spectacular. It was all good, but not great.


The second half, on the other hand, was given over entirely to the SPCO and Shostakovich's Chamber Symphony in F and was a truly remarkable piece (here I must once again admit my bias towards the SPCO). This is an incredibly intriguing and dynamic piece, always changing, and filled with "darker" notes. Unlike the Baroque pieces of the first half, the Shostakovich had the feel of a deep story lurking behind the notes. It was dramatic, such as the sudden end of the third movement, and the more subtle end of the fifth, in which the lead violin plucked the final notes along with the harp, underscored by sustained notes from the rest of the strings. Ruggero Allifranchini, the SPCO's associate concertmaster, led this piece from the violin, and if you have ever seen him in performance you know he is a treat to watch. He is very intense and clearly relished the piece. The rest of the orchestra as well excuted this piece marvelously, and what a piece. At the end I turned to Kelly and said, "Holy crap, that was COOL!" It really was one of the most amazing pieces I've every heard (and after the Vaughan Williams two weeks ago, that is saying something) and I will definitely be tuning into MPR this Saturday night to catch the live broadcast of that concert. One of the pieces I heard the SPCO play back when I first joined the staff was another Shostakovich piece (a piano concerto, I think) which was also amazing, and so Kelly and I have come to the conclusion that we really like Shostakovich. (It makes me regret the fact that I missed the ICOF concert back in Week 1 where the Chamber Orchestra of Europe played multiple Shostakovich works, including another chamber symphony.)


With just one week left I am thankful that I've had the opportunity to catch so much of the festival so far, as I have been treated to one amazing performance after another by the world's top chamber orchestras. This festival is the first of its kind, and from what I've seen I hope it will not be the last.

This is a little belated, but this past Saturday night I was able to make The Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra's concert which also featured the London Sinfonietta in Week 2 of the International Chamber Orchestra Festival (or ICOF as it is affectionately known). This concert was split up with the SPCO playing the first half, and the London Sinfonietta playing the second. For the SPCO's piece they played Beethoven's Emperor piano concerto featuring Pierre-Laurant Aimard on piano and as director. Aimard is my favorite of our current Artistic Partners, as he is so animated and so much fun to watch when he plays. Sadly, he wraps up his term as Artistic Partner in mid-February with Beethoven's 1st and 2nd piano concertos, so just one last chance to catch him here at the SPCO.


The Emperor was amazing and Aimard and the SPCO had me enraptured the whole time. The piece itself is lovely and flowing, going from soft quiet bits back into full-blown orchestral splendor in very Beethoven fashion. There was a very nice horn bit at one point that had a delicate feel to it (wonderfully done by Bernhard Scully and Paul Straka); moments like these gave such a beautiful texture to the whole piece. I'm not very familiar with Beethoven's piano concertos and hadn't heard this one before, and clearly I've been missing out. An absolutely flawless performance.


The second half of the program was given over to the London Sinfonietta (with members of the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, the guest orchestra for week 3) and Goebbels Songs of Wars I Have Seen, set to text by Gertrude Stein. It was, to be sure, an interesting piece, though not always to my own particular taste. Working at the SPCO I have certainly become more adventurous when it comes to trying contemporary music (this piece was composed in 2007), but I am not a huge fan of atonal, or "crunchy," music. This piece certainly fit the "crunchy" designation, with much of it possessing a very random feel to the music, punctuated by more traditional, Baroque-sounding bits. By the second half of the piece, however, I was warming to it, especially the end where many musicians played not their regular instruments, but Tibetan prayer bowls which create a specific resonant note. This went on for some time towards, building in intensity, under the playing of other instruments and the effect was quite nice. The piece also calls for the female musicians to read the Stein text (selections from her journals) in addition to playing. These also came across to me as somewhat random, I didn't always see their connection with the music, and I felt like the readers were a little stilted in their delivery. To be fair they are orchestra musicians, not actors, and being an actor myself I am perhaps more critical of that aspect.


All in all the Goebbels was a unique experience and I'm glad I saw it, though I think I could have come in halfway through this 55-minute epic and not missed anything of note.

This week is the first week of the International Chamber Orchestra Festival (ICO Festival), hosted by The Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra as part of its 50th anniversary season (which means that, as an SPCO employee, life has been a little crazy!). Each of the 4 weeks of the festival features a different guest orchestra. In week 1 this is the Chamber Orchestra of Europe (COE), which of all the guest orchestras is most like the SPCO in that they too perform a wide range of repertoire (as opposed to only playing music from one period). Each weekend also features a variety of different concert programs with different combinations of the orchestras playing together or alone.


I attended last night's concert at the Ordway which featured the SPCO and the COE playing several pieces together, all under the baton of Douglas Boyd. Douglas Boyd is one of the Artistic Partners of the SPCO, plus he was a founding member of the COE (who he played with for many years as an oboeist), and so this made him the perfect conductor to bring the two orchestras together. And he did so seamlessly, they played for all purposes as one unified orchestra. The concert opened with a piece by Tippitt (20th century) composed specifically for two groups of string players (as, indeed, all of the night's pieces were). It was a lovely piece, lush and beautiful, quite the opposite of the usual stereotype of modern music as being atonal and dissonant. The concluding Bartok piece also shunned this stereotype. I found the first movement a little slow, but the lively 4th movement with its dramatic finish made up for that. But the highlight of the concert was the Vaughan Williams piece, Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis. It was, without exaggeration, the most beautiful thing I have ever heard, a beauty only accentuated by hearing it live. It was simply amazing.


All in all a fantastic concert and one of the best I've heard from the SPCO (which is saying something). There are still three weeks left of the ICO Festival and my hope is to catch at least one performance with each of the visiting orchestras.

On Saturday night my wife and I attended The Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra's concert at the Ordway. The performance featured French pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard as guest conductor and pianist (he is currently one of the SPCO's Artistic Partners). First, two disclaimers: 1) I work on staff for the orchestra so I am admittedly am a little biased. 2) I know next to nothing about classical music.


The performance was fabulous. It started with a short piece by Ives called The Unanswered Question which had a handful of woodwind players playing on stage, with the string players and a trumpet playing from the hallways around the audience, a veru unique effect. I don't know that I "got it," but I did like it. Next Aimard performed several short solio piano pieces by Ravel. When Aimard plays the piano he exudes this sense of discovering each note for the first time, a strong sense of play that is simply delightful to watch. The last piece on the first half was a suite by Debussy that featured most of the orchestra with Aimard as conductor and was a treat, a light fun piece.


The second half was Beethoven's 4th Piano Concerto with the full orchestra and Aimard leading on piano. Like Beethoven's 7th Symphony, this concerto has some great moments where the orchestra starts soft and suddenly builds to a huge crensendo which made for a nice end to the concert.


So, a great evening filled with a wide variety of pieces, each different from all the others. The first half was all 20th century music, but they were all lovely pieces and I enjoyed each of them. The SPCO really is an amazing group of performers (again, I admit my bias, but really, they're amazing) and just keep getting better. I don't usually know all the pieces, but that's part of the fun - getting to experience more than Mozart and another Haydn symphony.